


Keep Your Young, Brittle Bones (in the Skin You Love)

by thelittlegreennotebook



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, Heavy Angst, Romantic Angst, really just all the angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-03
Updated: 2015-05-03
Packaged: 2018-03-28 21:34:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3870559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelittlegreennotebook/pseuds/thelittlegreennotebook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What are you doing?” comes his voice, cautiously reproachful, from the entrance to the new lair. Felicity freezes before letting her hands flutter down to rest on her bag. He would show up now. Of course he would—it’s practically his motto. Oliver Queen: making your life that much harder since 2012.<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	Keep Your Young, Brittle Bones (in the Skin You Love)

**Author's Note:**

> Unintentionally prompted by opheliafics on tumblr. Oops?  
> Title (and most of the mood) comes from the acoustic version of 'Fly' by Meadowlark.

“What are you doing?” comes his voice, cautiously reproachful, from the entrance to the new lair. Felicity freezes before letting her hands flutter down to rest on her bag. He _would_ show up now. Of _course_ he would—it’s practically his motto. Oliver Queen: making your life that much harder since 2012.

She takes a deep breath, steadying herself because—inappropriately placed jokes aside—God knows the imminence of tearing herself away from this man will shove her off balance, pitching her mercilessly to the floor. 

And she has no one to blame but herself.

“I have to go,” she says, the emotion already jamming behind the barriers that she’s thrown up from the sudden fear that floods her veins at his presence. Fear of what walking away from him—from them—will mean. Fear that he’ll refuse to let go. 

_ And I wish you wouldn’t go, but I know you better. _

That is what she had said to him just a little over a year ago, when he walked away from her and towards his death. Everything has changed so drastically since then—there is a metal band on her finger and the suffering rhythm of her heart to prove it. A year ago, Oliver walked away from a _maybe_ ; now, she is walking away from a _definitely_. Her something and her everything. She can feel her bones aching under the weight of it.

_So I’m not going to ask to you stay_ , she had said. Somehow, she knows that he won’t be granting her the same courtesy so easily.

Par for the course, he takes a step towards her. “Felicity, no, you don’t.”

Her fists curl around the straps of her bag protectively. “I do, Oliver. I—“ She lets her eyes slip closed for a moment, and the mechanical whirring and bright lights of their headquarters fade from her vision until it’s only her and her darkness. “I have to find him. My father—he needs to be stopped. I won’t let him hurt anyone else that I love.”

“Felicity…”

He doesn’t deny it, though—the devastating catastrophes her father has caused—because it’s true. She thinks of her mother all those years ago, broken hearted by a demon she thought to be a man. Of Digg, the unimaginable pain in his eyes at the resurfaced loss of his brother and the newfound danger to his wife and child. Of Oliver and Thea and Laurel and Barry. The way no one has been able to look her in the eyes for weeks, as if they’re scared that she is the devil incarnate.

She thinks of all of the families her father has destroyed, all of the husbands and wives and siblings and children, and thinks that maybe her friends have a reason to be scared of her.

“I need to do this,” she says, her voice steely with resolve because she’s not eight years old anymore, crying into her pillow when she missed her dad. She’s not seventeen anymore either, desperately searching database after database for any trace of a father that didn’t exist anymore. She’s Felicity Smoak, here and now, and she’s the one who needs to stop him. She thinks maybe that’s the way it always has been. 

The comforting, persuading words she’s said to Oliver before in the efforts of preventing his moralizing fate threaten to bubble up and contradict what she knows she has to do. She shoves them deep, deep down inside of her and into a place where she thinks her light used to be. 

She swallows thickly. “Please don’t ask me to stay.” Because so fragile under his touch, his gaze, his voice, she would. She would, and she can’t. The choice is obvious and impossible.

“It’s a suicide mission, Felicity.” he tells her, a sudden snap—but instead of anger, only sadness reflects in his eyes. “I won’t let you go alone.” And then, softly—so lovingly she feels her heart nearly burst at its seams—“Let me help you."

She lifts her eyes then to meet his, two sets of unwavering blue crashing together. He is just as sure in his resolve to keep her close as she is to leave. How ironic, the number of times his forced destiny threatened to destroy them, and now it’s Felicity’s past that’s delivering the final blow.

She hooks the bag onto her elbow and lets it slip off the table to hang at her side. His resolve is as strong as hers, yes, but if there is one thing that she knows, it’s that Oliver will not stop her from making her own decisions, even if it means his own desolation. She tries not to think about how using that to her advantage makes her all the more horrible—but, then again, that’s kind of the point. She is the daughter of a monster. Pieces of her are irrevocably her father’s. 

Slowly, she walks over to him, her mouth twisting into a barely-contained curve of agony.

“You can’t help me this time,” she tells him softly, finally understanding how hopelessly isolated he must have felt all of those times it came down to his life or his sister’s. His life or Digg’s. His life or her own. “I have to be alone."

He reaches out his hand to curl his fingers loosely around her wrist, and the emotion in his ocean eyes crashes over her in suffocating waves. “I won’t lose you."

She looks at his face searchingly, memorizing the features that personify the other pieces of her—the very best pieces—that do not belong to her father or mother or anyone else but him.

“I will always love you, Oliver,” she says in a broken whisper as she leans up onto her toes to press a short, desperate kiss to his lips.  Like so many of their firsts, it's laced with the agony of two souls being torn apart, and she hates herself just a little bit more for reducing them once again to fractured goodbyes and empty futures. “But you already have.”

She skims her nose down the stubble of her cheek and breathes just once against his collarbone, inhaling the woodsy scent of love and happiness and home—the only one she’s ever found, right here in his arms. 

And then she pulls herself away. Her hands are shaking with the profound impossibility of walking away from him as she slowly works the ring off of her finger and presses the warm, unblemished metal into the center of his palm before curling his hand into a fist and wrapping her small fingers around it.

A single tear slips down her cheek and she knows, as surely as it happens, that he will let her touch slip away from his. He’s a hero, after all—the instinct of sacrifice sings out from his veins. He understands the unavoidable anguish of giving up everything you love to preserve everything you can’t live without. It’s a backwards kind of torture, dark and deep and crushing, but he understands.

And now, as she walks away, letting the space between them wrench back open into worlds of blistering, barren emptiness, Felicity thinks that maybe she does, too. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm whatcuriousthings on tumblr if you want to stop by for a chat!


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